Maxim D. Shrayer

I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah - Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures, and History Maxim D. Shrayer

In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin's regime increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings and actions.